Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Obama's Startup Funds Assistance Plan

There is a largely overlooked section of Obama's American Job Act that bodes extremely well for young entrepreneurs. According to one book I recently read, and I loosely paraphrase here, 20-somethings are the perfect entrepreneur candidates (assuming a number of other characteristics besides age) because they have the least to lose and the most to gain. One hindrance to this is if you quit your job before you've built sizable savings to enable you to focus solely on starting and building a business, you have no safety net. Awwwwww! That's the sound of young people falling to the ground and trying to figure out how to ask the parents can they move back into the house they so willingly left not long ago so they can avoid homelessness.

Obama's plan includes a provision that reforms federal unemployment insurance. No, I'm not talking about extending the length of unemployment to help the jobless and seeking. I'm talking about extending unemployment to ...entrepreneurs! The American Job Act would create a Self Employment Assistance (SEA) aprogram in all 50 states that provides unemployment benefits to self employed individuals, aka entrepreneurs, for up to 26 weeks.

Many entrepreneurs could use that money as a source of startup funds. And those funds could mean the difference between a young aspiring entrepreneur taking the leap now or waiting. The problem with waiting is sometimes that magic date never occurs. What was it Langston Hughes said about a dream deferred?

"Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore-- And then run?"